UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, University of Chicago, and the Broad Institute will create the Commons Alliance Platform with funding from the National Institutes of Health November 06, 2017 By Tim Stephens The life sciences are in the midst of a data revolution. Technologies such as …

By Benedict Paten We, the authors listed below, are privileged to be part of the growing global community bringing data and life science together. Our groups have been working together in overlapping combinations during the past two years to drive the creation of data commons …

This prototype visualization of a genomic variation graph zooms in on portions of the NOTCH2 gene, an important gene for development. The colored bands represent 5 different variants of the gene, with rectangular shapes representing nodes (shared DNA sequences) and the colored ribbons between nodes representing paths/edges (not sequences). In the top panel, introns are shaded out (at right and left) while the solid colors represent exons 4 and 5. The exons are shown in increasingly greater detail in the bottom two panels. The visualization tool can also provide an intuitive graphical view of inversions, as shown in the green and red loops in the simulated example to the right. Images courtesy of Wolfgang Beyer, software developer for the Computational Genomics Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

A comprehensive, genomic variation graph offers an intuitive view of how human genomes vary Biomedical Computation Review | By Katharine Miller Humans share 99.5 percent of their DNA sequence, but that still leaves plenty of variation to go around. To get a handle on which …

NATURE | TOOLBOX Andrew Silver 29 May 2017 In 2015, geneticist Guy Reeves was trying to configure a free software system called Galaxy to get his bioinformatics projects off the ground. After a day or two of frustration, he asked members of his IT department …

By Carl Zimmer When Benedict Paten stares at his computer monitor, he sometimes gazes at what looks like a map of the worst subway system in the world. The screen is sprinkled with little circles that look like stations. Some are joined by straight lines …

By Mary Todd Bergman:
Public access to Oxford Nanopore’s MinION™ USB-attached miniature sensing device enabled an international consortium to evaluate the technology and provide a standard protocol for its use; Preliminary analysis of data generated in five very different laboratories indicates the performance and accuracy of the device is consistently good; Data are freely available for re-analysis and innovation in the Nanopore analysis channel on F1000Research.